Tom is Dead (11 page)

Today, Stuart's sentence is like a talisman. I bring my hand to my neck and I say it to myself. It's my hard-earned medal at the tender base of my neck.

A cop rang our doorbell. He asked to speak to me. He showed me his ID, he was dressed in civvies. Me in my dressing gown, hair not brushed, standing at the door to the apartment, this Australian cop saying my name. I shook my head and I leant against the wall, on that infernal landing, with that apartment looming behind me. Hell must be anonymous. Maybe they pronounce the names once, at the entrance, and then, once the threshold is crossed, a nameless magma blasts a black fire.

‘Can I come in?' asked the cop. I couldn't move. In this nameless flesh, this most damned of all damned flesh.
Take me away
—if I'd been able to speak I would've asked to have it all over with.

‘Listen,' said the cop. ‘You haven't replied to our summons. I'd like nothing better than to close the file. But you must cooperate.'

He was a nice cop. I based my reasoning, when I reasoned, on the binary system, nice people/nasty people.

We sat down opposite each other at the table, the one where we all ate at night, the silence broken only by our chewing. You have to eat,
the show must go on
. I was suddenly conscious of the mess and the dirtiness. The table was sticky with yoghurt, dried cereal, and crumbs. Under the table, the same. There were clothes on the chairs. I didn't know anymore which were dirty and which were clean.
I need to tidy up
, I thought. I was stranded in a dressing gown, like those housewives in American telefilms, the ones who drink in secret, the ones who have committed the worst crimes.

‘Tell me how your son died,' the cop said to me.

I appreciated that he didn't name him. That he didn't say
Tom
as if he knew him, as if we both knew him. I nodded. An Australian face, red and blond, wide, jaw like a convict, a very white smile. ‘There was no autopsy,' said the cop. I looked into the middle distance, more or less into nothing. I got up, I took a pad of Post-it notes from out of a pile of junk mail and unopened envelopes. The cop watched me. I wrote on one of the Post-it notes that I couldn't speak. ‘There was no autopsy,' repeated the cop as he read, and he looked at me again. His face is the only one that lingers on from that whole time. Two blue lozenges for eyes. Was it before or after the hospital? Or maybe even much earlier?

I remember his white short-sleeved shirt, his long shorts like the whole of Bondi wore, and his Velcro sandals. Onto a chair, amongst the scattered clothes, he'd thrown a jacket that had fallen heavily, making a metallic noise—had he come armed? Or was it the sound of his cop badge, of his sheriff's star? Bang, bang. Take me away. Mentally, I held out my wrists. Handcuffs and prison. Get it over with. He wanted me to tell him about Tom's death. This matter of the autopsy. Given how Tom died, of course, an autopsy. Cremation, of course. Remove every last trace. ‘You had him cremated.' No body, no evidence. As he spoke, an old news story came to mind. A woman had returned from the mountains without her husband; she'd taken one last photo, asking him to move back. He'd fallen a hundred metres. The perfect crime. I'd found it funny at the time. I was twenty, living in France, long before the children. Compassion wasn't exactly my middle name. ‘You're French,' said the cop. I remember bits of sentences. ‘Your father's in hospital.' The cremation. Why had we had him cremated. ‘It was your decision,' said the cop. The hospital had told him it was my decision.
It was not your fault
, Stuart had said. And that I had waited, made others wait, beyond the legal waiting period. Beyond that, it's the communal grave. I said, or I wanted to say:
after
. It was
after
Tom's death. I wanted to say it in English,
after
, in the cop's Australian language. ‘Yes?' he encouraged me. With his tense expression, attentive, almost anxious, almost Stuart's face. ‘What?' he asked me.

What,
after
? I didn't know anymore. I forced myself to say the
f
, the
f
of
after
, to blow into the emptiness between my lips,
ffff
, but it made no sense. And to make the
t
audible, make a little air explode between my teeth. And the
a
, and the
e
, and the
r
—I really wanted to open the floodgates, I wanted to establish a timeframe, for the cop, the timing of events, the before and after, the cremation. I wanted momentarily to say an
a
, an
e
, and an
r
, it was important, what I had to say, the timing, to establish the facts, to bend the rules of my system, to utter an
a
, an
e
, an
r
, but it was impossible. For my mouth, my tongue, my throat, impossible. Atrophy. Ankylosis. That old French rhyme—Toto and Lolo are in a boat. Toto falls in the water. What's left? Cremation. ‘Why?' asked the cop. He didn't say ‘Tom', at least that was something. ‘Write it down, then,' he said to me, and he pushed the pencil towards me along with the Post-it note on which I had written:
I can't speak
,
post-traumatic syndrome
. I smiled at him. He made an encouraging gesture. I picked up the pencil and drew Toto's head, like we did at school in France. 0+0 equals Toto's head, two eyes and a nose. ‘Very good,' he said. ‘Very good. It's a routine investigation.' I wrote,
after
. ‘After what?'
After the cremation
.

In Australia, at the time, cops were nice; I'm talking about the cops in charge of investigating mothers. A few years before our arrival, they'd had a case, in the desert, near Alice Springs, like the Grégory case in France. A child had disappeared. A baby, a little girl still breastfed. All they found were shredded bits of her nappy. Her name was Azaria, Azaria Chamberlain. Her parents were members of the Seventh Day Adventists. They also had two sons, they were camping at Ayers Rock, that monolith that the Aborigines call Uluru. At first, the Aborigines were accused, then the dingoes and, finally, the mother. I'd read a book about this story, a huge bestseller. The author, John Bryson, had picked up countless faults in the proceedings, in particular on the side of the forensic scientists. These guys had spent months throwing nappies stuffed with food at dingoes, crows, and other animals found in the bush, to study the tears—fangs, claws or human hands? I had read this book, innocently, at a book club in Vancouver. What we discussed was, who was guilty.

Stella had just been born and I imagined myself in the mother's place, flanked by my two sons, grieving for Stella. That lasted for ten days maybe, the time to read that fat volume and to discuss it with the ladies in Vancouver, and then we went on to something else, to what women over there read, Patricia Cornwell or John Grisham. And that forgotten book (what remained of it? The red glow of Uluru, a crying woman in a courtroom, who had the face of, what was her name, little Grégory's mother?) that forgotten book came back to me, returned to my head from my library in limbo, the moment that cop entered the apartment. That cop rang the doorbell, and something rejoined the flow of time. Mrs. Chamberlain. Little Azaria. Maybe it's thanks to them that I didn't go straight from Victoria Road to an Australian prison. Australian cops had made enough of those kinds of mistakes. After the Adventist, the French woman?

Stuart started opening the letters and went to a hearing. He told our story. They had to compare our testimonies, as it were: the one from the Post-it note, the one from Stuart. And that's how it went. The file of Tom's death. Case closed. The perfect crime.

Do we know which book accompanies us, which book bequeaths us an image that will recur, a mystery other than its narrative? In the same way, before all our exiles, even before meeting Stuart, I let my eyes wander over world maps without knowing that one day such and such a city would render death familiar to me, without knowing that one day such and such a city would be as familiar to me as death. And I watched children without knowing, other people's children, without knowing that they were mortal, and, three pregnancies later, my own.

Sydney. This picture postcard city. This Olympic city. My house, my poor house, this apartment that we were just passing through. We were on the streets, streets of the mind, a labyrinth.

When Stuart told me, in Vancouver, that his next post was in Sydney, it seemed inconceivable to me to settle there without first taking an interest (and getting the children interested) in the Aborigines. This interest lasted until I landed, after which finding a place to live, then moving in, left me little time for Tjukurpa and ancestral paintings, or for Truganini, the last Tasmanian. Then Tom's death rendered every genocide obsolete. Tom's death wiped every race and every culture off the face of the earth.

The world came back to me when we found the strength to move to the Blue Mountains. To kill time, to avoid the emptiness, I poured over the books in the local library and I plunged back into Tjurkurpa and the Dreamtime. It's a time that lasts a long time. The creatures that inhabited it left traces. On Uluru, there are the fist imprints of a red lizard that defied the rock, and the marks of combat between the bellbirds and the blue Lizardmen. Etcetera. The book that I wanted to read to Tom was a collection of legends, a welcome present for a young immigrant. I've since read it to Stella, and it ended up back in circulation, a library that won't be haunted by Tom's death, but by everything, everything else, and, therefore, by Tom too.

When I see the koalas in the Blue Mountains National Park, I think of Tom's innocence, of his great kindness, and I cry. Grieving renders you simple-minded and cynical at the same time, solemn and damaged. Nothing of what I think anymore has the lightness and grace of former times.

Uluru is one of the oldest rocks on Earth. It's a piece of the bottom of the ocean, the ocean from the beginning of the world, which has come to surface in the Australian desert. The rock is three hundred metres high, and it is imbedded more than two kilometres into the ground, like an iceberg in the burning desert. The Aborigines disapprove of climbing it, but there are crowds of tourists at the summit. The newspapers count the dead, victims of heart attacks, heat and the steep slope. That a white child should disappear at Uluru, eaten by the rock, seemed logical to me. An immemorial, wild justice. The Dreamtime. I took an interest in this, in Vancouver, and then, ten years on, in the Blue Mountains. The time that separates these two periods is the time of Tom's death, the time when I am not here.

I heard
maman
all the time—it was neither Stella nor Vince; besides, they both said
mummy
. The house was empty. I was in the idleness of death. And Tom called to me. It was his voice. I answered
oui
in French. A whistling at the base of my throat. The apartment was silent. The doors didn't creak, the taps didn't drip. Sydney's strange birds squawked on the other side of the windowpanes—and the regular bell of the buses, and the signal that spoke to the blind
beep beep beep
…Victoria Road's song, familiar and muffled, familiar and terrible, was penetrated, seven storeys up, by Tom's voice. Tom's voice was clear, unique, recognisable. One night, as I was setting the table with four plates—a
maman!
, plaintive, furious, like often when he woke from his nap. ‘IN YOUR FUCKING HEAD!' Stuart shouted picking up the fragments of plate, and he knocked on my head with his closed fist, five hard knuckles,
knock knock
.

Stuart heard that I heard Tom. Stuart and I were so unhappy, so lonely, that it seems we spoke to each other all the same, a telepathy of misery. Maybe misery is a form of intense energy, a fluid that fills houses—we become swimmers, we invent strokes and ways of drowning, and the eddies of others reach us only in waves. Maybe he heard Tom, too, maybe he heard Tom like I heard him, saying
p'pa
or
daddy
; Tom didn't mind speaking English with his father. The clatter of the plates had made Stella shriek, but maybe it was Tom's voice that had frightened her, and that often woke her at night. The Knock Knock family. Tom jealous, Tom behind the windowpane, watching his brother and his sister who were still with us—the parent thieves, the love thieves (if we could still call love Stuart's feeding routine, and my moments of panicked kisses)—Tom, full of hatred, trying hard to send the survivors mad.

But when I was alone with him, I loved his calls. I stopped still. ‘
Montretoi
.' Show yourself. I thought these words intensely, so that he'd hear me. The instant of his voice was so brief—the time to take notice, the time to get caught up in it—that the hubbub of Sydney, the vibrations of the windowpanes and that sort of permanent grating of the heat—the general sound that life emits closed immediately around his call again, like water.

I dozed in the sunroom. The circles in the air marked the point where Tom was once again engulfed. I positioned myself in the centre for a few seconds, and they pulsated. I saw them, the circles, enough to touch them. Tom had been there. A lake materialised in the room, in the sunshine of that Sydney autumn, that drought sun, blue sky dulled by the heat, air blasted with dust. Tom had been there, his voice had hollowed out a brief point of silence in the noise and the nothingness of life in Bondi.

I got used to hearing his calls, to listening out for them; but they always took me by surprise. Sometimes I heard them in the next room, too late to get there in time. One of my first conscious acts was to buy five tape recorders, one for each room, and a huge stock of cassettes. I turned the recorders on as soon as the apartment was empty: from nine in the morning till roughly four in the afternoon, then at night. I only missed those hours that were devoted to the family, meals, bath, bedtime. The rest of the time, the recorders were on, in the blinding midday light or in the stifling insomnia of the southern nights. I got up every two hours to change the cassettes. I quickly understood that I needed at least a sixth recorder, to listen to the tapes: I would've had to live several days in one to sort through this murmur, through these breaths; to listen to the previous days, while, with difficulty, I lived through the day that was being recorded.